Sketching His Way Through Genesis

By ALLEN SALKIN

Published: October 18, 2009

CONSIDERING that barely a word has been changed from the original, the warning on the cover of a new, illustrated version of the Book of Genesis -- ''Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors'' -- might seem surprising. Until, that is, one reads the name of the illustrator: R. Crumb.

Mr. Crumb is known almost as much for his bawdy underground comix featuring characters like Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural as he is for ''Crumb,'' the 1994 documentary about him. But he has been driven less by his sexual impulses in recent years and more by the 45 minutes he spends in seated meditation every morning in the medieval town house he shares with his wife, Aline (they became grandparents this month), in the south of France.

One day 15 years ago, for no reason he can remember, Mr. Crumb decided he wanted to read the myths of ancient Sumer. Eventually he found a scholarly work that said some of the myths were similar to the stories in Genesis. He read Genesis closely, and the idea of illustrating it clicked. He told a literary agent friend that if he could fetch a big enough advance, he'd do it. W. W. Norton & Company came through with $200,000, which seemed enough; Mr. Crumb thought he could bang out the project in a year or two. It took four.

As unlikely as it may seem, Mr. Crumb has become something of a Bible scholar. In a telephone interview from France, he bristled at a description of his book by his British publisher as ''scandalous satire.'' ''I had no intention to scandalize the Bible,'' he said. ''I was intrigued by the challenge of exposing everything in there by illustrating it. The text is so significant in our culture, to bring everything out was a significant enough purpose for doing it.''

During the interview he described his thinking while working on certain sections. His answers have been condensed and are in the slide show on the left.

DRAWINGS: ABRAHAM AND ISAAC: I don't think Isaac knows exactly what is happening. He is very passive. In Genesis he is a very passive character. He is not as active as Jacob or Joseph or Abraham. Abraham is kind of a take-charge dude. But even Abraham gets pushed around by his wife. They all get pushed around by their wives. The matriarchal traditions, which were suppressed when the priestly class modified these old myths for the Bible, come through more strongly when the stories are illustrated. The fact that people can persist in the information age to take this as a fundamental word of God, words to live by, rules to live by, that's really crazy to me.; NOAH: The fact that God is ordering him, ''O.K., I'm going to destroy the human race, and you have to build a ship'' -- Noah is in shock as far as I'm concerned. The Sumerian version of the story, which is older, is very interesting to compare with this. In it, when the flood is over, the humans came out of the ark and celebrated by cooking an animal, and the gods came down and swarmed over the meat like flies. It is a much more elemental and detailed story. In the Bible after the flood Noah is in gratitude with God and gives him a burnt sacrifice. God is so touched for some reason by the smell of the meat that he decides that he will never again bring a flood to destroy the human race. It doesn't quite add up somehow.; GATES OF SODOM: A friend of mine had a book showing me some African cities that still exist that are in the southern end of the Sahara. They look like biblical cities, so I just took it out of one of those photographs. In other comic book versions of the Bible they show the people of Sodom and Gomorrah basically having a good time being drunk and carousing in the streets and gambling. These are considered bad things, but to me this isn't bad enough. I was interested in some kind of real cruelty that God had to be truly horrified of, massive amounts of genuine cruelty and inhuman behavior.; ABRAM: (later renamed Abraham by God) It was my crude attempt to capture his vision of all this future suffering that is supposed to take place with all his people. In the background are all the suffering faces of his people. I made them dark and murky because it's a vision of the future. It's not a clear photograph of the future.; JACOB AND RACHEL: It says in the Bible that Rachel is very comely to look at. It actually says Rachel was well formed. I'm not very good at drawing attractive women actually. But Rachel has strong qualities that would incline one to suspect that she was some kind of priestess. The household gods were these things belittled as idols by the patriarchal priestly cast who wrote down the stories in the Bible. But Rachel steals an idol from her father's house when they are leaving. These idols found in archaeological digs are almost all entirely female, little female goddess figures, and these things were in the hands of women.
DRAWINGS (DRAWINGS BY R. CRUMB, TEXT TRANSLAYED BY ROBERT ALTER/W.W. NORTON & COMPANY)